The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America

What's wrong with black women? Not a damned thing The Sisters Are Alright exposes anti-black-woman propaganda and shows how real black women are pushing back against distorted cartoon versions of themselves. Tamara Winfrey Harris takes sharp aim at pervasive stereotypes about black women. She counters warped prejudices with the straight-up truth about being a black woman in America.

Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement

In these newly collected essays, interviews, and speeches, world-renowned activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world. Reflecting on the importance of black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolitionism for today's struggles, Davis discusses the legacies of previous liberation struggles - from the black freedom movement to the South African antiapartheid movement.

The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl

"My name is 'J' and I'm awkward--and black. Someone once told me those were the two worst things anyone could be. That someone was right. Where do I start?" Being an introvert in a world that glorifies cool isn't easy. But when Issa Rae, the creator of the Shorty Award-winning hit series The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, is that introvert--whether she's navigating love, work, friendships, or rapping--it sure is entertaining.

Being a black woman in America means contending with old prejudices and fresh absurdities every day. Comedian Phoebe Robinson has experienced her fair share over the years: She's been unceremoniously relegated to the role of "the black friend", as if she is somehow the authority on all things racial; she's been questioned about her love of U2 and Billy Joel ("isn't that...white people music?"); she's been called "uppity" for having an opinion in the workplace; and yes, people do ask her whether they can touch her hair all. The. Time.

I'm Judging You: The Do-Better Manual

With over 500,000 readers a month at her enormously popular blog, AwesomelyLuvvie.com, Luvvie Ajayi is a go-to source for smart takes on pop culture. I'm Judging You is her debut book of humorous essays that dissects our cultural obsessions and calls out bad behavior in our increasingly digital, connected lives - from the importance of the newest Shonda Rhimes television drama to serious discussions of race and media representation to what to do about your fool cousin sharing casket pictures from Grandma's wake on Facebook.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. Yet, as legal star Michelle Alexander reveals, today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against convicted criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans.

From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation

In this stirring and insightful analysis, activist and scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor surveys the historical and contemporary ravages of racism and the persistence of structural inequality such as mass incarceration and black unemployment. In this context she argues that this new struggle against police violence holds the potential to reignite a broader push for black liberation.

Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

Medical Apartheid is the first and only comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans. Starting with the earliest encounters between black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, it details the ways both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without their knowledge - a tradition that continues today within some black populations.

Kimberlina says:"Author composed this book so that it is interesting."

Between the World and Me

"This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it." In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation's history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of "race", a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men.

The Little Black Book of Success: Laws of Leadership for Black Women

Three powerful African-American female executives celebrate their gender and heritage as they share their secrets for success in this effective guide for businesswomen. Ways to communicate thoughtfully, trust yourself, and exude self-esteem are just a few tactics the authors discuss for those who want to enter the workforce as confident leaders.

How to Be Black

Beyond memoir, this guidebook offers practical advice on everything from "How to Be the Black Friend" to "How to Be the (Next) Black President" to "How to Celebrate Black History Month". This is a humorous, intelligent, and audacious guide that challenges and satirizes the so-called experts, purists, and racists who purport to speak for all black people. With honest storytelling and biting wit, Baratunde plots a path not just to blackness, but one open to anyone interested in simply "how to be".

The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race

National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward takes James Baldwin's 1963 examination of race in America, The Fire Next Time, as a jumping-off point for this groundbreaking collection of essays and poems about race from the most important voices of her generation and our time.

Around the Way Girl: A Memoir

With a sensibility that recalls her beloved screen characters, including Yvette, Queenie, Shug, and the iconic Cookie from Empire, yet is all Taraji, the screen actress writes of her families - the one she was born into and the one she created. She shares stories of her father, a Vietnam vet who was bowed but never broken by life's challenges, and of her mother, who survived violence both in the home and on DC's volatile streets. Here, too, she opens up about her experiences as a single mother.

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

As Ferguson, Missouri, erupted in August 2014, and media commentators across the ideological spectrum referred to the angry response of African Americans as 'black rage', historian Carol Anderson wrote a remarkable op-ed in the Washington Post showing that this was, instead, 'white rage at work. With so much attention on the flames,' she wrote, 'everyone had ignored the kindling.'

The Fire Next Time

At once a powerful evocation of his early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice to both the individual and the body politic, James Baldwin galvanized the nation in the early days of the civil rights movement with this eloquent manifesto. The Fire Next Time stands as one of the essential works of our literature.

They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement

Conducting hundreds of interviews during the course of over one year reporting on the ground, Washington Post writer Wesley Lowery traveled from Ferguson, Missouri, to Cleveland, Ohio; Charleston, South Carolina; and Baltimore, Maryland; and then back to Ferguson to uncover life inside the most heavily policed, if otherwise neglected, corners of America today.

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

Audre Lorde pioneered "biomythography" in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, originally published in 1982. In this extraordinary tale, Lorde weaves a narrative tapestry out of the threads of her own life - from her family's immigration to New York through her own coming of age - and the lives of the women who shaped her.

Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man's Education

How do you learn to be a black man in America? For young black men today, it means coming of age during the presidency of Barack Obama. It means witnessing the deaths of Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Akai Gurley, and too many more. It means celebrating powerful moments of black self-determination for LeBron James, Dave Chappelle, and Frank Ocean. In Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching, Mychal Denzel Smith chronicles his own personal and political education during these tumultuous years.

Patricia Hambsch says:"History through a Young Black Man's Eyes!! Perfect"

Fracture: Barack Obama, the Clintons, and the Racial Divide

Barack Obama's speech on the Edmund Pettus Bridge to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches should have represented the culmination of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream of racial unity. Yet in Fracture, MSNBC national correspondent Joy-Ann Reid shows that, despite the progress we have made, we are still a nation divided - as seen recently in headline-making tragedies such as the killing of Trayvon Martin and the uprisings in Ferguson and Baltimore.

The Mis-Education of the Negro

Here is an unapologetic look into the factors that have caused so many Blacks to think and act in the negative way they do towards themselves and others. This timely body of work is from a man well versed in the American educational system, as well as educational systems throughout the world.

Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul

America's great promise of equality has always rung hollow in the ears of African Americans. But today the situation has grown even more dire. From the murders of black youth by the police to the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act to the disaster visited upon poor and middle-class black families by the Great Recession, it is clear that black America faces an emergency - at the very moment the election of the first black president has prompted many to believe we've solved America's race problem.

Queen Sugar: A Novel

Why exactly Charley Bordelon's late father left her eight hundred sprawling acres of sugarcane land in rural Louisiana is as mysterious as it was generous. Recognizing this as a chance to start over, Charley and her 11-year-old daughter, Micah, say good-bye to Los Angeles. They arrive just in time for growing season but no amount of planning can prepare Charley for a Louisiana that's mired in the past: as her judgmental but big-hearted grandmother tells her, cane farming is always going to be a white man's business.

The History of White People

A mind-expanding and myth-destroying exploration of notions of white race—not merely a skin color but also a signal of power, prestige, and beauty to be withheld and granted selectively. Ever since the Enlightenment, race theory and its inevitable partner, racism, have followed a crooked road, constructed by dominant peoples to justify their domination of others. Filling a huge gap in historical literature that long focused on the non-white, eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter guides us through more than two thousand years of Western civilization, tracing not only the invention of the idea of race but also the frequent worship of “whiteness” for economic, social, scientific, and political ends.

Publisher's Summary

Jezebel's sexual lasciviousness, Mammy's devotion, and Sapphire's outspoken anger - these are among the most persistent stereotypes that black women encounter in contemporary American life. Hurtful and dishonest, such representations force African American women to navigate a virtual crooked room that shames them and shapes their experiences as citizens. Many respond by assuming a mantle of strength that may convince others, and even themselves, that they do not need help. But as a result, the unique political issues of black women are often ignored and marginalized.

In this groundbreaking book, Melissa V. Harris-Perry uses multiple methods of inquiry, including literary analysis, political theory, focus groups, surveys, and experimental research, to understand more deeply black women's political and emotional responses to pervasive negative race and gender images. Not a traditional political science work concerned with office-seeking, voting, or ideology, Sister Citizen is an examination of how African American women understand themselves as citizens and what they expect from political organizing. Harris-Perry shows that the shared struggle to preserve an authentic self and secure recognition as citizens links together black women in America, from the anonymous survivors of Hurricane Katrina to the current First Lady of the United States.

What the Critics Say

"Harris-Perry offers fascinating observations of how black women are, at times, constricted by their mythology and asserts that their experiences act as a democratic litmus test for the nation." (Booklist)

The book was such an eye opener. It is well written and provides great insight into the mis-recognition and shaming of Black women. It is a deeply emotional and insightful perspective on Black women.

What other book might you compare Sister Citizen to and why?

I haven't read any similar books

What aspect of Lisa Reneé Pitts’s performance would you have changed?

The narrator had a hard time translating the transitions in the book, as well as the excerpts from other texts that are in the hard copy of book. It is therefore difficult to know when the narrator is reading Harris-Perry's text or one of the poems or short stories Harris-Perry re-printed in the text.

I was floored by this writing. This book answered so many questions for me. More importantly, as an African American woman of possible mixed heritage, who has spent much of her life questioning whether she was black enough, I now see how most of my experience is rooted in the challenges that being African American entail.

This book said so many things I didn't have the words to articulate and so many things I knew were happening and was told I was imagining. It's comforting to know that there have been studies and research to validate my experiences and to have confirmation that it wasn't in my head.

Where does Sister Citizen rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

Sister Citizen ranks #1 among all the audiobooks I have listened to.

What did you like best about this story?

What I liked best about this story was that I was able to reiterate it to other sisters without wondering if I truly grasped the message.

What does Lisa Reneé Pitts bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

Lisa Renee Pitts brings a clear perspective to the story that If I was readings it I would not have experienced. Her tone allows you to absorb her perspective without feeling like she was imposing it upon me.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

Yes, this book was exactly what I wanted to listen to all in one sitting.

Any additional comments?

I am convinced that this book is like a bible for Black women and that the information in it should not fall by the way side. The perspectives that were given in each chapter guided my thought process into better understanding what I already knew and believed about "us" as a people in respect to how awesome we are, why it is so important to support one another and stay vigilant to what's going on for, around and against us. My first week reading the book I suggested it to every black women I encountered. This book was introduced to me by my daughter (my sista soldier) so it gave us the opportunity to discuss our observations, understanding and beliefs about who we are as a people and specifically; as black women.

Sister Citizen by Melissa V. Harris-Perry is a foundational read/listen for all scholars! I am currently an African American Studies and Sociology Student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. This semester my Black Women in the Contemporary US course has lead me to this book! I will be forever grateful and continue to seek knowledge!